The Art Of Embodiment

18/11/2025

Our bodies are antennae,

Attuned to signals from the wider world.

If you listen closely enough

You will hear the voices of the leaves,

The skylark, the hare at dawn

Whispering beneath your skin.

Your bones still know the songs

The world used to sing.

Somewhere, under the layers of civilization,

Generations deep,

The world is singing the old songs to you.

If you have ears to listen,

There is still a way home.

- Gavin Conochie

20/07/2025

13/02/2025

The fact that our parents were doing the best they could, within the capacity and understanding they had at the time, is true...

But the reason this can feel so hard to accept is that sometimes a parent’s ‘best’ can fall so very far short of what we actually needed as little ones.

Sometimes a parent’s ‘best’ can be so actively damaging to us in mind and body that our little systems were wholly unable to metabolise the reality we found ourselves living in.

Instead we constructed a fantasy of the ‘good’ parent, imagined them into a better version of themselves than they really were, and came to believe that what was happening to us must somehow be our fault.

Because if it’s my fault, then maybe I can do better, be better... maybe I can do something to change it...maybe I’m not as powerless and frighteningly vulnerable as I appear to be.

06/06/2024

"Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.

Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune...and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied. Such ‘non events’ are what the British paediatrician DW Winnicott referred to as ‘nothing happening when something might profitably have happened.’”

- Gabor Mate

23/04/2024

On Addiction:

“I now have such compassion for those in the clutches of obsession/compulsion/addiction. I understand more deeply than I ever have before what an act of mercy to ourselves those activities are.

They actually are a part of ourselves that love ourselves so deeply that they will do anything to protect us from potentially shattering pain and truth.

I believe they are holding out hope, keeping us in a holding pattern, until we are capable of allowing the truth of what happened to our exquisitely tender souls to come to consciousness and transmutation.

The counterpart to this is that it makes it very clear that you can’t get in between a person and what they are doing, what they are using, to be able to live in their own skin. You will never make them stop doing what they need to do to preserve themselve. The will to live is that strong.

But we can offer them love, empathy, dignity, and prayer.”

Pat McCabe

18/04/2024

What began to heal my wounds in the end was not the love of other human beings, which - oh-so-important as it was – was always imperfect, and likely to stray at inopportune moments.

What began heal my wounds in the end was discovering that the Earth herself embraced my presence, that she welcomed the fall of my footsteps...that the world had a place for me...and that, at last, I was not alone.

06/08/2023

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, undigested pieces of experience are held subcortically and in our cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Encouragement to “just get over it, that’s totally irrational, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true” and so forth is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of violence and aggression.

It’s like an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory, and only contributes to re-traumatization, in personal, cultural, and collective networks.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the sense that no one can understand, that there is no companionship into the dark night. I am alone in this. This is devastating to the soul.

When that raging alive little boy or aching little girl cries out longing to be held, to be known, to be felt, to be heard, to be remembered… peeking their little heads out as if to say, “Is it safe now? How about now? I’ve been waiting for so long for a companion and friend. How about now?”, they’re really not all that interested in our clear cognitive analysis, rational inquiry, powerful spiritual insight, and thoughts on the matter.

They’re yearning for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be allowed to come out of that frozen state and live once again.

In this way they don’t even want or need to be healed, but to be held. And to feel safe.

Photo by Alexas_Fotos

02/05/2023

This video expresses so well the reason it's good to s-l-o-w down when we're working with trauma. Good for both the client and the therapist to remember.

13/01/2023

We live in a culture where no choice is permanent. There’s always more than one option. If we just hold out long enough, that more perfect partner will appear.

I hate to break it to you, but they won’t.

There is no perfect or even near-perfect partner. All people are difficult and annoying—that includes you!

What makes a partner right for you is a shared willingness to create a secure relationship. If you both are willing to go all in together, you are “perfect” for each other.

11/01/2023

Some really helpful words from Jamie Catto about common misconceptions around the shadow.

A quick word on a huge misconception about the Shadow...and what we get up to on the workshops and shadowy courses...it's not about meeting your Dark Side, like your shameful and angry or greedy parts - but it's the Hidden side. It's the cellar full of ALL the parts of us that were made to feel unwelcome or shameful when we were kids, so to preserve love and inclusion we hid them away (in the shadows) - which does include the standard, 'socially-unacceptable' things like anger and greed but there's just as much, if not more, lovely, light stuff buried and suppressed as there is the predictable 'yucky stuff', for instance;

~ our relationship with our body and our sensuality

~ our freedom to enjoy pleasure without shame

~ our freedom to get up in front of the other humans and share our excitements or vulnerability without feeling mortified

~ our experience of letting inspiration take us

~ our permission to draw, to sing, to be flamboyant, to be cocky, to be mischievous, to be saucy, to be outrageous, to stand out from the crowd, to be a free thinker, to be a rebel, to disobey, to trust ourselves, to trust other people, to speak our truth, to leap into the void!
..and a thousand other gifts just waiting to return to us.

I feel that the whole 'Dark Side' misconception of Shadowork puts people off a bit - when really it’s a very gentle way of welcoming home our gifted and suppressed treasures. It's a beautiful, funny, unprecedented RELIEF to come back to authenticity and stop exhausting ourselves with the masks and strategies and obsessive maintenance of the brochure of ourselves lest anyone should know what's really going on inside.

I mean, really.

((oh and I’m doing a new thing early this year (doors opening now) - a 5 month deep dive gentle adventure (closed group) called Gamechanger, where we play with our shadows, creativity and intimacy while making some life-long friends along the way - maybe it’s for you 🙂 jamiecatto.com/gamechanger ))